All you can do is watch your hero walk along it, getting into automatic battles and equipping them with any armor that they can find. The beginning runs see the procedurally-generated roguelike and dungeon crawler genres stripped down to its basics: A single, randomly-generated looping path, littered only with slimes that appear. That’s what you’re doing story-wise, and from a gameplay perspective, but going beyond that, Loop Hero sees Four Quarters doing this with the entire genre. The entire goal of the game, after all, involves starting from a point where the world has been stripped down to its mere basics, and then rebuild it part by part, fragment by fragment, building by building. It might sound tedious on paper, but not only is it executed perfectly in action, it’s actually genius when you think about it. Do you want to find relics with various buffs? Work on the branch that gets to the right building. The ability to level up and earn traits for each run? Gotta craft the right building. You know the typical encyclopedia you get in games such as this that details every enemy, item and whatnot that’s encountered? It was at least a good ten or so hours into the game before I was able to gather enough resources for additional buildings at the base camp in between runs until I reached the intel center that I could build. Beyond that, what I realized with all of this time is that Loop Hero differs from a lot of similar roguelikes is that it shockingly doesn’t start you out with the mechanics that you’re used to, instead making you earn them. Loop Hero easily ends up being a massive time sink in the best way possible. Basically, your goal is to set up a proper series of constants that they can hang on to despite memories being a fragile thing here, up until they can directly confront the Lich several loops later. So it’s up to you to play cards that help build various pieces of this world, ones that can help them find remains of the past but that also bring new enemies to conquer. Our protagonist sets out to stop the Lich, but is hindered by the loops and finds themselves encountering the same path over and over. So for those of you too busy to read the preview in the above link or just want a quick recap of the game’s premise, the Lich has completely thrown the world into a never-ending loop where time is meaningless and everything is in flux, which is kind of a bad thing. So I suppose you could just consider this a continuation of my experience with the game, which, spoilers, has still not stopped being addictive to the point where it can still kill my productivity. But also, if we’re being honest, Loop Hero makes for one of those rare instances where the preview version already contained so much of the game (having lasted for several hours), beautifully showcased its simple yet perfect mechanics, and has seemingly had little change in the past two months that doing a particularly lengthy review would basically just lead to me repeating myself. Well, that and this illustrates the game’s central concept while allowing me to save on time. Wait…haven’t we already done this before?Īh, sorry, I guess I ended up getting sucked into the world of Loop Hero so much that I’ve begun to experience my own time loops. That’s right, it’s the productivity killer of…um… It has already achieved a level of addictiveness met only by the true greats, having basically almost delayed this review because I was too busy playing it, wanting to dive in for one more run. But Loop Hero, the latest game from Devolver Digital and developers Four Quarters, could potentially end up being the next big hit among the genre. There’s no shortage of roguelikes, dungeon crawlers and deck-builders on the indie circuit, so it takes a lot to stand out among them.
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